「ガンバスター」/「タガナー」

It’s quite illuminating to watch Gunbuster and recognize things that I’ve seen before scattered throughout so many shows just because they decided to pay an homage to this. The obvious case is Gurren Lagann, where certain little things are straight up ripped out from this show. Another case would be Lucky Star’s Bun Guster track. At many of these points, it was like a light flipped on in my head and I went ohhhhhhhhhhhh.

What’s more impressive is that even though this is one of the oldest shows I’ve watched, it still felt new. It was kind of like when I watched Utena for the first time. In this case, the time dilation stuff added a really interesting dimension to the entire plot. While Gurren Lagann relies on physical size alone to give it that grand sense of scale, here, time and distance are used as well. It’s not on the same scale physically, but it definitely matches in the sort of awe you feel when you watch it.

This all makes Diebuster quite interesting as well. While it’s a “sequel”, it feels very different. There are some callbacks and some of the same themes, but it’s largely doing its own thing. I spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and how it connected to Gunbuster but it just ended up giving me all the answers I was looking for. I don’t think there was the same sort of awe as when I watched Gunbuster, but it was more like ‘wow, that’s pretty neat’.

But comparing these two to Gurren Lagann makes their similarities a lot more apparent. Both are about a girl who look up to a girl who’s very successful as their role model. Both of them eventually surpass their role model and achieve their dreams through hard work and guts. And then both of them save the world together with the mentor they’ve surpassed.

Watching these was kind of exciting because everyone loves Gurren Lagann and the question is whether Gainax will be able to top it. I imagine everyone who watched Gunbuster and Diebuster must’ve thought the same thing, that surely they can’t top THIS. I’m glad that they’ve proven us wrong twice now.

「静雄無双」/「巖本英利/旧PNス・タンリー」

I’d planned to write about Durarara!! during the whole twelve days of anime thing, but I dropped it at the last minute to make room for Utena and Star Driver. But now, you’re going, wait a second, there was no Durarararararara!! this year, how can it be a special moment in anime for this year?

Well, you see, it turns out a chunk of the light novels was decently far along. I went through books four through six, which, if we allow ourselves to dream a bit, would correspond to the second season. I liked the anime, but I think everyone is in agreement that the second half is weaker, although whether it was still good or terrible is up for debate. The nice thing about the three books immediately after is that the focus is not on Anri or Kida, so you won’t have to worry about them being a downer in your anime about crazy and exciting things in the big city.

So it should please everyone that a second season of the anime focuses much, much more heavily on everyone’s favourite really angry guy, Heiwajima Shizuo. The fourth book goes back to the Durarara/Baccano standard of telling a story with about a thousand different threads somehow coming together at the end. The fifth and sixth books form one story in which Shizuo is the focus in the same way that Mikado, Anri, and Kida were the main characters of their respective arcs. We’ll also see some familiar faces. An interesting thing about the fourth book is the return of some characters that you may or may not remember and the introduction of several new ones.

Shizuo was a really great side character before. He shows up, gets trolled by Izaya, and proceeds to destroy things, usually with other things. The focus that books 5 and 6 puts on him is great because it develops him from the guy that can be described by the previous sentence into a legitimate badass. I feel like he’s always been thoughtful and that his only real problem is getting pissed off really easily, so I enjoyed watching him put his talents to use in a more focused way.

The thing that I enjoy about Ryohgo Narita’s stuff is his ability to launch a million seemingly unrelated characters and plot threads and be able to tie them together. The one-volume version of that is very neat to read through, but I have a feeling that there’s some longer term stuff that he’s set up in the early books that will come back in a big way and there are already hints of that at the end of the sixth book. This isn’t unlike the Haruhi series, where seemingly inconsequential details come back later in an earthshattering way, although, here the pieces are bigger, I guess.

Really looking forward to that second season.

「ありがとう放浪息子」/「神田川」

The main problem for the characters is some variation of that, isn’t it?

Anime is full of traps and when you sit back and think about it, it’s kind of like, wow, they’re everywhere, aren’t they? Which, if you think about it, is kind of strange that Hourou Musuko feels so different from everything else. I mean, it’s an anime about traps.

An easy description of Hourou Musuko would be that it’s about gender and sexual identity and it does it realistically, unlike the usual fetish or comedy treatment. But what’s more interesting isn’t just that it examines these things in a realistic and mature manner, but that it starts from square one. These are children that are dealing with these things.

So we have these kids and we’re watching them struggle with it on their own. If they’re lucky, they meet someone to struggle along with. Maybe they’re doing okay for a while. Suddenly, things change, and they’re in middle school and have a whole new slew of bullshit to worry about. There’s never really any rest from these things, there are no answers and the kids just have to keep on growing up and dealing with crap that comes their way.

That the anime chose to focus on the middle school parts was something I found kind of unfortunate. Yeah, it’s really exciting that there’s a ton of relationship drama here, but I thought a nice thing about Hourou Musuko was that it took the time to take a look at the slower parts of the characters’ lives as well. Of course, it worked out that the particular slice that they chose to animate has some sort of closure, so that was nice. But just like how the manga starts long before the anime does, now the manga has gone beyond where the anime ends and everyone’s in high school.

Just like with Usagi Drop, we’ve had our fun times watching these kids grow up, but that’s not going to last forever. I don’t know whether this mangaka typically focuses on long term things, but I’d really like to see where this crew ends up in five, ten, or more years down the road.

「闇の力を秘めし鍵よ」/「hatsuko」

I don’t think it’s that much of a surprise if I tell you that Madoka made me watch Cardcaptor Sakura. Well, that’s not entirely true. A more accurate phrasing of that statement would be, I watched Cardcaptor Sakura in anticipation of Madoka. Yep, I spent a good chunk of the Christmas break just before Madoka aired watching the entirety of Cardcaptor Sakura.

Cardcaptor Sakura seems to be one of those childhood anime that sits alongside the likes of Dragon Ball or Sailor Moon. I actually had no idea it was dubbed in English and aired here until when I was way too old and cool for that crap. More recently, it went from ‘that show that a few of my friends watched that seemed lame’ to ‘that show that people cite as the epitome of its genre’.

CCS is a pretty lengthy show, at about 70 episodes. After I got into the whole magical girl thing, I’d planned to watch it eventually, but never really had the time or motivation to do so (which is fairly common for shows that I plan to watch because I “should”). But with 2011 and Madoka quickly approaching and having finished all of my grad school applications, I convinced myself to finally start.

Up until then, my benchmark for magical girl shows was Nanoha. As far as Sakura and Nanoha go, they’re pretty similar. For a while, before I watched either of them, I’d get them confused sometimes. Obviously, I knew that CCS wasn’t going to have huge explosions or funnels, but it was sort of surprising because I’d forgotten that magic doesn’t necessarily manifest itself as a giant pink beam of death. It turns out magic has a wide array of uses.

Speaking of magic, I was surprised to learn that Sakura’s magical girl outfit was not and that there wasn’t even a default outfit. I don’t even know if she actually ever wears the one that she’s seen wearing in most promotional art in the show. The only constant in her magical girl wardrobe is her staff. But nope, Sakura’s eclectic fashion is thanks to Tomoyo.

And I’m not entirely sure when it happened but the focus of the show seemed to shift slightly from Sakura learning to be a magical girl to include falling in love. She basically spends the entire show tracking down the Clow Cards in some way, but somewhere along the line we also get scenes of her and Syaoran sorting their feelings out. Something that I didn’t expect was for the entire show to basically consist of Sakura dealing with the Clow Cards. But even then, the last thing that Sakura had to do before everything ended wasn’t to save the world, it was to tell Syaoran that she loved him.

This love thing was new to me, especially coming from Nanoha, where at best, we have some best friends forever stuff crossing the line occasionally with undertones. Girls and boys interested in each other? Why I never! But it was interesting because it actually went there instead of dancing around it. And it was quite nice seeing Sakura and Syaoran growing in that way.

I think this show made me realize it’s okay to watch shows made for little girls even if they’re not wrapped in a layer of beam weaponry and sci-fi military trappings.

P.S. despite this post’s title, the best OP is Platinum

「キャスターと龍之介」/「ラク」

It’s that time of year again, in which I brush off a bunch of drafts that I’d hoped to post over the course of the year but didn’t get around to finishing on time. A funny thing happened on the way here, which is that I was expecting to not have enough to post about. The reason is that I would have been posting consistently about all the things I wanted to post about all this time. But as it turns out, well, “@blkmage ha ha haaaaa”.

Look forward to twelve days of quality handcrafted posts about some japtoons.